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Metagaming Thread - Understanding is Key to Victory

Cheater Hater Wrote:Looking at the latest picture, do deer appear on plains hills naturally? I don't remember ever seeing it, but I haven't played as many maps as you guys (especially if it's a modified donut, like SevenSpirits was suggesting).

I don't think that's unnatural - seems normal to me. Could be wrong of course.



As for the map, it's definitely a Donut base script as Seven suggested. It just has to be - or I'd bet pretty heavily on it anyways. The shoreline is a hint, but the bigger hint is the abundance of grassland and rivers, and just the general resource layout. Take a look at early screenshots of the land surrounding Spullla in PB2 and look at this land. It's really, really similar. No other script that I've seen generates grass river tiles that frequently. Note other things like the lack of floodplains, the lack of deserts, the lack of tundra, etc. The little bay south of our capital would be man-made in that case, but that's certainly plausible. So yes, I'd bet pretty confidently that this is a customized Donut. smile

One other distinguishing feature (that gives things away a bit) about Donut is that Jungles are the main oddity with that map script. This was one of the (few) mistakes the PB2 map team made on what was otherwise a very good map. Jungles only appear at the Equator in Donut as you might expect, but this leads to much more different land quality around the donut than you'd expect - the equator teams in PB2 got robbed a little bit because of having to deal with those. I think of Inca, Dantski, and Nakor in particular who got quite a bit. The alternative though is to play with the "No Jungle" preset, but this often ends up completely removing a bunch of calendar sources like Dyes, Rice, and Bananas. I'd expect in this case that the map team would have turned Jungle off, but it's quite possible they may not have noticed the lack of jungle-centric calendar sources. So it's quite possible we may be looking at a map with a few luxuries missing. It's not particularly meaningful to us just yet, but it's something to keep in mind as we continue to hypothesize.

Do we know what map size this is set at? We can roll some Donut maps with our guessed settings to see how close that gets us to the land tiles, and we can then formulate a guess on how much hand-drawn land there is out there and prioritize or deprioritize water exploration accordingly.
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Yeah, it's a standard donut like I used for the sim. About 1140 land tiles seems to be what the script generates if you let the middle be water (plus or minus a few due to lakes).
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The real map has 1300 land points. What we see of our start indicates that about 10 land tiles per player got sunk to give everyone an inlet. Which means we estimate a total of 210 tiles of added islands, 42 per player.

I wouldn't be surprised if the middle had galley-able islands and the outside had astronomical ones (since the outside ones will be varyingly difficult to reach for different positions).

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like starts will be about 20 tiles apart.
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So basically... PB2's map, in a nutshell?
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Amelia Wrote:So basically... PB2's map, in a nutshell?

Uh... yup. Hard to believe but PB2 used the same size map (only with 1680 land tiles instead of 1300, and all islands accessible by galley) for twice as many players.
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I suspect there will be some differences between the two, but honestly, PB2's general map design works great for this kind of game.

If we get 1300 land tiles here as opposed to 1140 for a random water-middle generation, that's 160 unaccounted for tiles. I'm betting stone/marble are present on either a central island or an exterior island at minimum - something you'd have to sacrifice to reach for. Either way, it would mean that there's not that much island-based land out there - surely much less than PB2. So unless we see something to us that indicates there's less continent land than normal, we can probably work with the assumption that islands will be helpful but we shouldn't kill ourselves getting them. We'll want IC routes at some point, sure, but that's about it. We can let others settle them and get them started and then we go take them with our Zerks. wink
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But an increase in land tiles per person might mean an increase in islands as well. Maybe bigger islands outside, but less land inside for the players? Donut has a lot of spare water in the middle and outside.
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Amelia Wrote:But an increase in land tiles per person might mean an increase in islands as well. Maybe bigger islands outside, but less land inside for the players? Donut has a lot of spare water in the middle and outside.

You think he might have removed a lot of the original donut? I'm skeptical.
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Easily checked though. The only ways i can see how a mapmaker can remove tiles from the original donut is to either strip off the outer or inner circle, circle by circle. Once we find the two edges of the donut, we can measure the length of it to see whether it's the same to a normal donut.

I'm pretty sure that your original assumption is correct, but it never hurts to double-check.
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